“Sir, try to hold still.” Taber’s voice was still heavy with command, but now tinged with a little bit—a very little bit—of concern. I turned and saw that her uniform blouse—despite the nip in the February air, she hadn’t been wearing a jacket—was pocked with a couple dozen pellet tears. On the left side of her jaw bone, a little pimple of blood beaded.
Her assailant moaned something, trying to shift position. “My hand…”
Well, sure enough, his right hand had seen better days. It had been gripping the wrist of the shotgun when one of my bullets blew his thumb off just above the base joint—and not a neat job, either. That didn’t concern me as much as the mat of blood that was soaking the left side of his shirt just below the armpit, and another leak from his right hip. He moved a little, eyes trying to focus, and when he did, I saw a puddle of blood on the step behind his head.
Neither Jackie nor I was about to clump past him into the RV to rummage for clean towels. The EMTs would be on-site anyway soon enough—that plus the little matter of securing the RV. We didn’t have a clue who might be inside, or what their intent might be.
“The ambulance will be here in a minute, sir. Just try to hold still.” I managed to sound concerned too, but my concern sure wasn’t directed at him. With that threat neutralized, Sergeant Taber was headed up into the RV, gun leading the way.
“Tisha,” the man said clearly, and then his eyes rolled up in his head and he sagged against the aluminum door frame, out for the count. His breathing was strong, and I saw no red fountains, so there wasn’t much for me to do except stand there, revolver in hand, trying to slow my own pounding heart.
The thirty seconds was an eternity while Jackie was inside and before the ambulance appeared in a great cascade of winking lights. Farther up the street another vehicle bellowed, siren loud and piercing. Sure enough, Undersheriff Estelle Reyes-Guzman’s Charger overtook the ambulance, and braked hard to swing into the motel parking lot.
I head Jackie’s soft voice behind me as she appeared in the doorway.
“…CYF officer ASAP,” she was saying, and I saw her wipe the blood off her chin as she holstered her automatic and switched the phone to her other hand. “One juvenile, looks to be three or four.” And sure enough, the little flaxen-haired girl, eyes like saucers, stood in the small space behind the driver’s seat, shielded by Jackie’s husky figure. The deputy bent down and scooped the child up. Quick to recognize where safety was, the tiny arms locked around Jackie Taber’s neck.
First impressions can be wonderful, I suppose. As the undersheriff swerved into the parking lot, and what did she see? An old man holding a .357 magnum, and his target collapsed on the steps of the RV, a Bermuda-shorted snowbird punched full of holes. Above them on the RV’s steps, Sergeant Taber holding a child. I had no doubt that Estelle’s analytical gaze pulled in all the details.
“The RV is clear,” Jackie announced.
I took a deep breath and holstered my revolver. Now that there was time for both a breath and some reflection, I knew that every step, every word, every action that came next would be scrutinized six ways from Sunday. As my first sheriff, the late Eduardo Salcido, had been fond of saying in tricky situations, “Make it right.”
Carrying the child, Jackie maneuvered down the RV’s stairs past the leaking guy in Bermuda shorts, and met Estelle halfway. The ambulance stopped behind the undersheriff’s sedan, and the two EMTs waited for some sort of cue. It was their scene now, but they needed to know that the bullets had stopped flying.
The sergeant and the undersheriff conferred for just a handful of seconds, and then Estelle was at the wounded man’s side, beckoning the EMTs. She didn’t say anything to me, knowing that I wasn’t about to go anywhere. At that precise moment, what had happened…the how of it all…mattered not a bit. If the child was safe, that was number one. The rest of the team would work on saving the shooter’s life.
Staying well out of the way, I watched the EMTs work, and felt a small—very small—surge of optimism. I could see that the head shot was a glancing gouge just above and behind the man’s right ear. If he was lucky, the slug hadn’t cracked his skull.
The wash of blood soaking his Hawaiian shirt came from a six-inch laceration where a hollow point had ploughed first across the flab of his upper left chest, then took a chunk out of his left biceps.
He awoke enough to emit a pathetic groan as they lifted him onto the gurney. One of the EMTs rigged IVs and took vitals while the other looked at the hip wound—probably the worst of the lot. It was a clean, straight-on puncture on the front upper hip well below the beltline, which meant that the slug most likely had wreaked havoc somewhere inside the old guy’s bowels. No exit wound meant that slug had caromed around inside his pelvic girdle—a wound that could be fatal as easily as not.
A little white SUV pulled into the parking lot, and I recognized the pudgy figure of Jerri Jaramillo, one of the reps from Children, Youth, and Families. To arrive so quickly, she must have been just up the street. The little girl was our main concern, and Jackie Taber hadn’t relinquished her hug on the child since carrying her off the RV. The transfer took only seconds, the child shielded from the curious, from the blood and violence.
I remained near the shotgun and watched as Estelle conferred with Taber, at one point examining the pellet wound on the sergeant’s jaw. The recently arrived second team of EMTs did their own examination in the discreet cover of the ambulance, making sure that none of the other shotgun pellets had missed Taber’s vest. I don’t care how tough you are, when the bullets stop flying, there’s a trauma that goes beyond the physical wounds. After some hushed consultation with her boss, Jackie Taber agreed to ride to the emergency room in the ambulance for a checkup.
Estelle Reyes-Guzman took a circuitous route back over to me. “One of the pellets glanced off her badge and cut her jaw. Just a nick.” The undersheriff looked hard at me again. “You’re okay?”
“Absolutely fine.”
She looked down at the shotgun as if she were examining a recently axed rattlesnake. “He shot just once?”
“Yes. The expended shell casing is right there.” I nodded to my right, where the red hull lay on the asphalt. I wasn’t about to blab on. She didn’t need a gusher from me just then. When she wanted more information, she’d ask.
Taking two steps, she moved to the ejected shell casing, knelt, and cocked her head to read the label on the side of the shell. “Number eights.” By her demeanor, I never would have guessed that her night and day were well blended. She gave no sign of fatigue, or that we were in the middle of anything other than a serene mid-winter morning.
“And that explains a lot,” I said. “She took a charge square in the chest.” I thumped myself for emphasis. “Right on the ceramic plate. Bird shot isn’t going to hurt her much, other than a hell of a thump.”
Estelle still knelt by the shell casing, looking over at the RV’s now empty doorway. I could see her measuring, computing. “So Jackie was twenty-five feet or so from the RV when he fired.”
“About that. Directly in front of her vehicle.”
“Did she have time to give any sort of verbal commands?”
“Yes. ‘Put the gun down,’ or some such. He fired without warning, and then started to turn toward me.”
She pivoted and looked at the scatter of empty .357 cases that I’d pumped out onto the parking lot in front of my own SUV. She didn’t question those, or why I’d even been on the scene in the first place. Nor did she explore the obvious first question: Who the hell fired first? All of that would come out in excruciating detail.
A small crowd was beginning to assemble over by the Posadas Inn’s portico, and one set after another of red lights arrived as officers tried to realign themselves from one active crime scene to another.
I sighed, feeling weary but, I had to admit, not the least bit repentant. My relief at Taber’s g
ood fortune slowed my hammering pulse. I scanned the parking lot, letting the events settle in my mind, and realized that the undersheriff was watching me.
“Are you all right, sir?”
“Just dandy,” I said. “It’s just going on eight o’clock, and I’m already wondering if this day is ever going to end.”
“You were going home?”
“Actually, I was following Miles Waddell. We were headed out to his mesa project. He had some things to show me. I’ll catch him on the phone here in a few minutes.”
She nodded slowly. “So, in a nutshell?” And I knew that she meant that.
“I saw Jackie northbound on Grande, following the RV with her emergency equipment on. They turned into the parking lot in front of me. As I was driving by, I saw the officer assume a defensive posture consistent with being confronted with an armed suspect. I turned my vehicle around in the street and returned, pulling into the parking lot right there.” I pointed where the SUV remained parked. “I had time to step out and then I saw that the man on the RV steps was holding a weapon. Jackie told him to drop it, and the next instant, it went off.”
“Had the sergeant drawn her own weapon?”
“No. Her hand was on it, though. That’s how fast it all happened. When he fired, I drew my own gun, and as he turned his shotgun toward me, I fired.”
“Had the sergeant regained her feet?”
“I don’t think so, but of course I wasn’t looking her way. It was my impression that she was down for a couple of seconds.”
“You fired how many times?” She knew there were five expended casings on the ground, but it was a way of determining how discombobulated I was.
“Five. All that was in the gun. And then I reloaded.” I unbuckled my belt and slipped the holster free, extending holster and gun toward her. “It’s still loaded.”
“I don’t need that, sir,” she said.
“Oh, yes you do.”
She took it without comment. “Are you headed over to the office?” She was being needlessly polite and deferential. We both knew damn well that’s where I was going, and whether by invite or order didn’t much matter.
“I’ll get started on the statement,” I said. “And I want to know who that son-of-a-bitch is.”
“I’ll be in when I can.” Estelle, knowing my propensity for roaming the county, added, “If you’d stay within earshot, I’d appreciate it. Feel free to use my office when you settle in to write the statement.” What a polite way to tell me to enjoy informal custody. She actually smiled. “Remember we were going to have green chile stew and corn bread tonight. We need to make sure that happens.”
I grumped. “You know, at the rate we’re going, the whole goddamn county is going down the tube. It’s going to take a month of Sundays to clean this up. Any word from Bobby?”
“Not yet, sir. We have a team on the way to Cruces now.”
I didn’t share her optimism, except that if Waddell’s project—whatever the hell it was—turned out to be Paul Bunyan’s ultimate target, he’d be back. If he’d seen his friend killed by a freak accident and then on top of that shot a law officer either by tragic accident or to cover his tracks after fleeing the scene, the killer had too much invested now to back off.
On top of that, I knew full well into what sort of a mess I’d managed to put myself.
Chapter Eight
“You don’t stay out of trouble long, do you?” Miles Waddell laughed in wonder, but I didn’t share his humor. I knew how detailed and excruciatingly accurate a good deposition had to be—over the years I’d ranted at my deputies to put their best into the paperwork, since that’s the part that formed the foundation of future court cases. And when the rancher’s telephone call jarred my concentration, I managed to strike half a dozen unintended keys on the computer.
He added, “You were a couple of blocks behind me, and then you disappeared.”
“Yeah, well. It’s turning into that sort of day. I was going to call you, and I got distracted.” I listened with only half an ear, the rest of me concentrating on the words on the screen.
“I got as far as the saloon, and stopped to pick up some bottled water. They’d been listening to the whole thing on the scanner. So I headed back.” Victor Sanchez’s Broken Spur Saloon rose out of the dust beside State 56 twenty-five miles or so southwest of Posadas. Life was slow if all the few patrons had to do was listen to the gibberish on the police radio. And even the age of 10-4’s, or 10-9’s or 10 anything was dying as the cell phone made life so much easier—and more private.
“Hurrah for spectators. I meant to give you a call. I really did.”
“Not a problem, sheriff. Are we going to be able to get together today? Or are they keeping you in the slammer?”
“The day is yet young. If I can, I will. But Miles, you need to buttonhole either the sheriff or undersheriff and bring them up to speed. No telling what might tie in.”
“I’ll do that. You’re going to be all right, though?”
“Don’t know.”
“You sound pissed.”
“I am, Miles. Shooting people does that to me.”
“So you really did that, eh?”
“I really did.”
“You’re all right, though.”
“So far.”
“Anything I can do?”
“Don’t suppose so. They’ll be interested to hear from you about when and where you first saw the RV and the deputy.”
“They came in on 56,” Waddell said. “I met ’em right after the interchange, right on the curve.”
“The sheriff is going to want every detail, Miles. Every damn thing you remember.”
“I never did see the RV pull over, though. Maybe he thought the deputy would just go on by.”
“You need to come on down to the office and offer a formal deposition to that effect. Every little piece is important, Miles.”
“Sure. I can do that. That’s the guy you shot, though? The old fart driving the rig?”
“That’s the guy.”
“It looked like Jackie Taber coming up behind him.”
“Sure enough.”
“She’s okay, though?”
“I think so.”
“That’s good to hear. What a goddamn bizarre world. Look, I’ve got a couple of things to do, so I’ll get out of your hair. I’ll catch you after a little bit.”
“Don’t let this slide,” I said. “If you’ve got something going on that’s attracting these chain saw bozos, we need to know about it.” We. “And by the way, they’d be interested in any sort of communications you’ve received lately that might be out of the ordinary. The sheriff will need to know anything along those lines.”
I hung up the undersheriff’s desk phone and leaned back in her comfortable chair, regarding the prose locked on the computer screen in front of me. I could have settled for he fired, I fired, the end. But the district attorney would want a little more than that. By the time I’d finished, the damn thing ran two pages. I read the epistle about eight times before sending a copy to file and print.
My door—the undersheriff’s door—was cracked, and I could hear the jabber from dispatch and the incessant ringing of the telephone. The lights on Estelle’s fancy phone flashed and blinked and died in a fascinating pattern. Nothing motivated me to move, the long hours of the night finally catching up with me. I heard a helicopter in the distance, and wondered if it was the Med-evac, airlifting the former shotgun-wielding, now much punctured, snowbird to more advanced treatment in Las Cruces or Albuquerque.
Had my aim been a little steadier, my target group a little smaller, it would have been his mortal remains heading to autopsy. Now, with him surviving to testify, his family could concentrate on deciding how many millions to sue me for. That didn’t worry me much, at least not yet. I’d been sued several times befor
e as folks tried to shift blame. Adults have a marvelous capacity to screw up, and it would not be me, or Mr. Shotgun, who suffered the most from all of this. It would be the tiny three-year-old, who had huddled in terror, while her captor pulled her world down around her terrified little head.
I was daydreaming thus in the undersheriff’s office, taking advantage of her hospitality, one image after another parading through my tired brain, head supported on both hands, when Sergeant Jackie Taber appeared in the doorway. Now in civilian clothes, including blue jeans and a western-stitched denim shirt, the only visible sign of her experience was a single small bandage along her lower left jawline.
“Good morning.” I sat up straighter. “You cleaned up nicely.” She smiled at that, her heavy, square face softening. I touched my own jaw. “What was the deal?” We shouldn’t even have been talking, but I was glad to see her up and about and refreshed.
She held thumb and forefinger together. “A little, flat pellet fragment, is all. The tetanus booster hurt more.”
“And what’s the deal with the child?” I relaxed back in the chair and latched my hands on top of my head…a pose that I’d assumed half a thousand times over the years as I waited for one of the deputies to explain things to me.
“There was a computer hit out of San Diego, their version of an Amber Alert, sir. The shooter is a sixty-eight-year-old grandfather, Nathan Baum, out of Orlando, Florida. He apparently abducted his granddaughter Patricia from her daycare in San Diego and was headed eastbound to rendezvous with the little girl’s father. There’s a custody suit going on between the girl’s mom and the dad. Mom has custody, dad wants custody, and granddad decided to get right in the middle and make things worse. It’s my understanding that mom and dad don’t like each other much, and granddad, the gentleman you ventilated, absolutely hates his daughter-in-law. She never was good enough for his son.”
“Ah, one of those. The kid’s dad lives in Orlando, too?”
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